Increasingly, corporate, nonprofit, and political entities rely on the distribution of information reports to communicate with existing and prospective constituents. While report uses may vary significantly, many entities utilize these reports for billing, advertising, and providing other information. The quantity of these reports distributed is sometimes extremely large and may be in the millions for entities such as credit card, utility, and telecommunications companies. Additionally, many entities need to communicate with their constituents on a monthly (e.g., for billing) or more frequent basis. The large quantity of reports and the repetitive nature of report distributions have caused many entities to devote considerable effort to managing the efficiency and cost of delivery and production of these reports. As can be appreciated, even a small reduction in cost, such as a fraction of a cent, on each report delivered to a constituent (e.g., report recipient) may noticeably effect the total report distribution cost, as the savings are multiplied by the number of report recipients.
In this regard, the delivery cost may constitute a large proportion of the total report distribution cost. Therefore, even a small percentage reduction in the delivery cost per report will significantly reduce the total distribution cost. The delivery cost per report is generally set by the delivery system selected to deliver the reports to report recipients. These delivery systems may include private orpublic (e.g., the U.S. Postal Service) parcel delivery systems and Internet communication services. As may be appreciated, the delivery cost may be based on characteristics of the report such as length, weight, and shape of hard copies and destination. Additionally, delivery systems may offer discounted rates based on volume or on reduced sorting (e.g., the reports have been presorted into classifications defined by the delivery system). Accordingly, entities presently strive to obtain lower rates by controlling the report characteristics such as size and weight and by managing the volume of reports distributed.
To further control distribution costs, efforts have been made to maintain or reduce production costs which include costs for labor, data processing, printing, and assembly (e.g., collation, separation, folding, and insertion in envelopes). Automation of many of the printing and assembling tasks has been used to control costs in report production facilities that produce paper or hard copies of, for example, bills or advertisements. For example, many report production facilities employ computer-controlled printers that feed automated insertion machines (e.g., inserters) which take the printed reports from an input bin, process the reports to fit envelopes having a specified size, and insert processed reports into envelopes. Although automation of these tasks has improved report production costs, efforts are continuing to optimize the computer systems used in the production process to provide additional reductions in production costs and to efficiently operate the printers and inserters.
Because data processing costs also contribute to report production costs, enhancements of current data processing methods are desirable in reducing the cost of distributing the information reports. Data processing costs generally consist of computer system costs for hardware and software (including initial development, maintenance, and processing time) and labor costs for personnel training, data entry, and data and/or program manipulation while processing data into a file (e.g., report output file) for use by the printers in the report production facility. Typically, the existing data processing systems have been incrementally developed to accommodate both the ongoing and continuous nature of data (e.g., report data) being input from internal or external sources and the format of the received report data. With the development of the data processing systems being driven by the incoming report data, inefficiencies in data processing of report data have been created, especially in the ability to control the contents of the report output file transmitted to the report production facility, and the inefficiencies have resulted in higher report distribution costs.
In this regard, the case of a business with monthly billing is illustrative. Typically, the business will divide its client list into two or more groups to facilitate the staggering of production and distribution of bills. For example, the business may choose to have four billing cycles per month, i.e., approximately one fourth of the customers will be billed each week. The business generally will establish, or contract with, a processing center to collect and store billing information, such as information regarding telephone calls or credit card transactions, for each client (e.g., report recipient). Then on a weekly basis, the processing center transmits to a computation center one month's billing information, or report data, for report recipients belonging to a particular billing cycle group. The report data includes all the information necessary to prepare and distribute each bill, including the address of the recipient and the output format or media type. The report data generally is transmitted in file(s) containing non-linked, sequential lines of formatted data. The computation center stores the report data, sequentially processes the report data a number of times to create each report output file, and then transmits these batch files to the report production facility. The report output files may be created so as to group the bills according to the bill output format which may include formats for varying languages (e.g., Spanish or English), length, and style. Next, the report production facility prints copies of the bills from the report output files, inserts the bills in envelopes, and transfers the envelopes to a delivery system, such as the U.S. Postal Service, for delivery to the report recipients.
In the described system, the sequential processing of the file containing the lines of report data is repeated for each output format to create separate report output files. The total processing time is a finction of repeated processing of the lines of data that are not selected during previous processing runs. The cost for repeated sequential processing is significant for businesses whose billing cycles contain millions of clients requiring multiple gigabytes of computer memory to store billing information. In addition, the processing becomes more complex and costly when the business operates more than one processing center to collect data in different geographical areas and more than one report production facility through a single computation center. Further, the quantity and format of the received report data make it difficult and expensive to control the content of the report output file because creation of report output files containing different groupings of bills requires additional sequential processing of the set or subsets of the report data.